Monday, February 15, 2016

Patent Grabber 6.4.1 beta (Build 11) is available for download!

OK, finally! There has been enough input and enough testing to put Patent Grabber 6.4.1 beta (Build 11) up for downloading. This will hopefully be the production version so long as I do not receive any problem reports.

The big problem was "link rot" issues, especially for features that used the EPO's "Open Patent Services" system. For a while it was a moving target (that's why I never released Version 6.4), but things have hopefully settled down for the time being.

I have added two new features that were requested by users:

First, users may now mix U.S. patent numbers and U.S. published application numbers in the download field. While it may seem like a simple concept, in operation it was a lot more complicated!

Second, I added the ability to combine many documents from one download list into a single Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. Say you just want to download the bibliographic pages from many patents, and have them as a single PDF file. Previously, you would have had to download the individual bibliographic files using Patent Grabber and then perform that final combining process separately using a PDF manipulation app such as the full version of Acrobat or (on the Mac) Preview. In Version 6.4.1 all you have to do is check the "Single PDF" checkbox and Patent Grabber will do everything for you.